- Oct. 8, 2025, 3:30 pm US/Central
- Alec Nevala-Lee and Chris Quigg, Author and Fermilab
- Chris Quigg
Join us for a conversation between biographer Alec Nevala-Lee (author of Collisions: A Physicist’s Journey From Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs) and theoretical physicist Chris Quigg as they explore the legacy of Luis W. Alvarez, the visionary Nobel laureate who revolutionized experimental physics with the hydrogen bubble chamber. From his collaboration with Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley to his later innovations in high-energy physics, Alvarez played a central role in ushering the field into its modern age, developing techniques that enabled the discovery of numerous new particles and pioneering the analysis of scientific data on an industrial scale—an achievement that left him deeply conflicted about the role of individual genius in the world of “big science” that he and his colleagues had made.